Thursday, June 25, 2015

Is It Time to Play "Beat the Southerners" Again?

It's a familiar game for Easterners, almost as popular as games that stereotype and ridicule Midwesterners, Christians, and American Indians [aka "Native Americans"], but that's for another day's analysis.

So, this month's episode of moral panic is over a piece of cloth that is a symbol for some. In other words, an inanimate object that has a variety of meaning applied to it. Christians who do the same with symbols such as crosses, crucifixes, and icons are ridiculed for doing so by non-theists, so it surprises me that many of the same people who inform me that my faith is nothing but a collection of empty vessels with no meaning have so imbued an old flag with such power. Not over them, of course, but over the unruly appetites of those who live in the South.

[Disclaimer: I care not at all about a flag that is culturally meaningless to me; I care about the stereotyping of any culture in historically limited terms. Of course, my wife is from North Carolina; my best friend from Alabama. The best Marine non-coms I knew and my smartest colleagues at Princeton were all Southerners. My view towards the South is obscured by reality, I guess.]

So, a collection of vendors, including Amazon.com, have decided that the best way to control their inferiors is to cease selling Confederate flags and related merchandise, thus ensuring that the South will be kept under the moral control of the bi-coastal elites.

While you may no longer be able to purchase the Stars and Bars on Amazon.com, look what you can buy:

And before anyone can respond with, "But, but, but...slavery!", I am reminded that the federal government recently decided to replace, on the $10 bill, a portrait of the originator of our monetary system, yet is leaving a slave-owner's likeness on the $20.